Due to unforeseen circumstances, Al Gore has had to cancel a Copenhagen speaking event at which he had hoped to charge starry-eyed believers in his ManBearPig religion $1200 a piece for the privilege of shaking his hand, breathing in his CO2 and having his latest book inflicted on them.

Could those unforeseen circumstances have anything to do with Climategate?

I think so. Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

North explains:

Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

And lest anyone doubt how big this story is, now Sarah Palin has weighed in. On her Facebook page she urges President Obama to boycott Copenhagen. She totally gets it:

The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe’s call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

She concludes (and if she goes on like this, we really ought to start thinking her of a serious candidate for next president: way to go, Sarah!)
(What America needs in order to survive is Ron Paul. But I think/know that it is already too late for Ron Paul now. America will collapse within the Obama Presidency. – Infinite Unknown)

Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a “sin” against the planet. In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to “restore science to its rightful place.” Boycotting Copenhagen while this scandal is thoroughly investigated would send a strong message that the United States government will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices. Saying no to Copenhagen and cap and tax are first steps in “restoring science to its rightful place.”

Yep. From your mouth to God’s ear, let us hope.

Meanwhile in the libtard-controlled MSM (apparently this is also dating ad code for “Men who have sex with Men” – sorry about that), the BBC is slowly, grudgingly acknowledging that Climategate might be more than just a little local difficulty at some obscure redbrick university department.

On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, it gave it a full 12 minutes. Needless to say, it stacked the odds heavily against the one man – climatologist Professor Philip Stott – brave enough to stick up for scientific integrity and rationalism and against Climate Change Hysteria. Not only was the debate sandwiched between reports by two of the BBC’s in-house greens Roger Harrabin and Richard Black trying to play the story down (the Climategate emails offer not a smoking gun but a “confused and half-baked picture” claimed Black), but we then had to put up with presenter John Humphrys ganging up with badger-bottomed climate-fear-promoter the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt against Stott.

“Bit of a coincidence having these glaciers melting when there’s all this extra CO2 in the air,” interrupted Humphrys sarkily, while Stott was trying to make an intelligent point about the AGW industry being an ‘inverted pyramid’ with an awful lot of policy being based on the claims of a very tiny number of scientists.

Yes, Humphrys. Coincidence. NOT CAUSATION.

Finally, my debate with George Monbiot on “Saying the unsayable: is climate scepticism the new Holocaust denial?”. I dunno what others thought – it’ll be up on Youtube at some stage so you can decide for yourselves – but I’d say it was a draw. Neither of us was at all interested in taking it ad hominem (I didn’t use the word ‘Moonbat’ once) and the gently donnish George didn’t try to make out that I was an evil fascist. Indeed, if he weren’t so utterly inexcusably wrong about pretty much everything I think I’d rather like the dear chap. The audience was split 50/50 between sceptics and deep greens (very few in the middle), so I doubt either of us said anything that would have shaken anyone’s unshakable position.

What was abundantly clear is that despite his apology soon after the scandal broke

‘I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.’

“The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging,”

Monbiot’s position on Climategate is now rapidly returning to the status quo ante. During the debate he kept stressing how very few scientists were implicated (“three or four”, he said) and how while, of course, scientific integrity is terribly important the vast majority of evidence is still behind AGW and the scientists suggesting otherwise are a bunch of fruitcakes whom we can safely ignore.

Expect to see a lot more of this happening. The Saudis may claim that Climategate is going to derail Copenhagen; the IPCC may just have announced it is launching an official whitewash – “inquiry” – into the affair; we sceptics may point till we’re blue in the face that Climategate is a game-changer because the implicated self-selecting, parti-pris cabal of data-raping scientists are at the very heart of the so-called consensus.

But still the AGW wagon train will trundle on, regardless. And true believers like Monbiot and Porritt will be defending it to their dying breath.